Now more than ever, the world is full of products and services to choose from, and every day, people are getting bombarded with 4000 to 10,000 marketing messages across multiple channels. Because of this and all the customer-focused marketing management, customers have a wealth of choices. So how do you get them to choose yours?
It’s time to become product-led. Whilst maintaining your customers at the core of your marketing strategy is essential, it’s time to place focus on your product; even if your company has the best marketing team in the world, they still won’t be able to mask a poor product or service. The SaaS industry is no exception to this.
According to the User Guiding Blog, business owners estimate that 70% of work-related apps that they use today are mostly based on SaaS. They also add that this rate will increase to 85% by 2025. This means that with all the growth software service companies are experiencing, it’s essential to focus on developing a successful product. But do you know the importance of your product in marketing management? What strategic decisions should be made, and how does this involve the product? It’s time to answer all those questions!
This article will cover:
- How important is your Product in Marketing Management?
- Product Marketing vs. Product Management
- Product and Marketing go hand in hand
How important is your Product in Marketing Management?
As you might have read in our last article, the primary function of marketing management is the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods, and services to create exchanges that are beneficial to individuals and organizations. Based on years of experience in the SaaS industry, we’ve realized that marketing and product should always go hand-in-hand.
On the one hand, product teams should adjust their roadmaps and feature requests according to marketing insights from customers and competitors. Marketing, on the other hand, should develop the most effective marketing strategy so that it can target the right customers and demonstrate that your product is the best for them. Sounds pretty straightforward, right?
Here are some strategies to help you understand this:
Pricing & Strategies
Determining the right price for your product is crucial when developing a marketing management strategy. It’s in your pricing that you tell your potential buyers how much you value your brand, product, and customers. It’s also one of the first things that can influence customers’ decisions about buying your product. For example, if your product is a software service, you should price it in accordance with its features and market. The price you decide will affect your customer’s perception.
Create detailed Buyer/User Personas
Creating detailed buyer or user personas means you’ve collected enough information to better understand your customers and their behavior towards your product/service. All this collected data will help you to adjust your product to their needs and to correct marketing strategies to attract those users in the first place. For example, if you’re still getting started, use the little data you have and target “ideal” buyer personas, which will evolve once you’re able to gather more information.
Product Roadmap
Product roadmaps outline a product’s vision, direction, priorities, and progress over time. They should be a joint effort of both product and marketing teams. It’s essential to create the best possible product roadmap to offer consistency and demonstrate your values successfully over your product.
Competitive Research
Performing competitive research can reveal market trends and gaps in your business plan. If your competitors are doing something, shouldn’t you too? For example, if a PSP platform doesn’t offer a particular feature while its competitors do, there’s a higher chance that your customers will switch to them instead.
Analysis of Customer Feedback
What do your users say about your product/service? How do they feel using it? Where do they have difficulties using it? Customer feedback always gives us an idea about how your customers feel about using your product. Based on this information, your company should revise its decision-making process and decide which marketing strategies to prioritize when creating assets.
FROGED provides you with the tools and resources your company needs to get a great overview of customers and their experience with your product. Through this, you can bring your marketing management to the next level. Explore our knowledge base and find out what we’re talking about!
Product Marketing vs. Product Management
People often mix up what product marketing is with product management. But they’re two different roles.
According to Berkeley MBA, “the product manager works to create and define new products and features, while the product marketing manager focuses more heavily on bringing those things to market.”
In other words, product marketing experts are responsible for ensuring that the company fully understands customer needs and builds products to meet those needs. Whereas product managers are responsible for a product’s overall success. They develop the entire development process, lead every department, and guide teams to achieve a successful product.
Take a look at the table below for an easy comparison of the two:
| Product Manager | Product Marketer |
| Create and manage the product roadmap strategy | Create and manage the marketing plan according to the product development |
| Communicate and align the team to the product development strategy | Communicate the product value to customers and internal teams |
| Metrics are focused on product usage, downloads, updates, etc. | Metrics are focused on customer churn, feedback, user journey, etc. |
| Product market analysis | Target market analysis |
| Business oriented | Sales and marketing oriented |
Check our recent article on Product Marketing vs Product Management in your Growth Strategy to have a more in-depth understanding of their differences, tasks, and responsibilities. We also recommend exploring How Product Marketers can improve SaaS Churn Rate to see how product marketing can improve your product success metrics.
Product and Marketing go hand in hand
Overall, product marketing and product management are two things that often get mixed up. Knowing the different responsibilities and approaches of the two roles will allow you to understand how to structure your company and marketing strategy. What’s more, it should be clear now why marketing and product should always go together – there can’t be a successful marketing mix without a well-designed product!
If you’re looking for more, check out our FROGED solutions to discover how we can bring your customer experience and product development to the next level. Download our Product-Led Success Ebook to discover the latest trends in the SaaS industry.